"The End Of Poverty" hits San Francisco

You may remember some of our previous posts about the film "The End Of Poverty." The documentary talks about how the Northern hemisphere takes all of the resources from the Southern hemisphere. This taking has kept most people in the Southern hemisphere poor, and the producers of the film fear it will only get worse.

"The End Of Poverty" is about to be shown in the San Francisco area. Ahead of the area premier, the film received a write up in the San Francisco Chronicle. Writer G. Allen Johnson interviewed filmmaker Philippe Diaz.

"It's not a political issue, it's a mathematical issue," Diaz, 48, said by phone from Los Angeles. "I don't want to get too political; I want people to understand what's going on. It's not who's right and who's wrong - that's not the point. The point is we are consuming 30 percent more than what the planet can regenerate, and we have to understand what the consequences of that is.

"The world population increases every year. That means that for the countries of the North to maintain our lifestyles, our level of consumption, our level of waste ... we will have to plunge more and more people under the poverty line. It's mathematical."

Narrated by Martin Sheen, "The End of Poverty?" assembles an impressive collection of experts, including "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" author John Perkins, and contends that the current system of Western powers exploiting Third World countries can be traced back to 1492, and the Spanish conquest of the New World.

The film says that more than a billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day and that the United States contains less than 5 percent of the world's population yet consumes 25 percent of the world's resources and creates 30 percent of the pollution. Among other things, Diaz calls for agrarian reform - the returning of land to its people - and forgiveness of Third World debt.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/03/NSEI1AOTN8.DTL&type=movies#ixzz0Yf8sLdQN